Author

Aditi Sridhar

Date of Issue

2017-04-26

School

Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information

Abstract

Nutrition literacy is a relatively nascent field and is a subset of health literacy, often being interchangeably referred to as nutrition literacy, nutritional health literacy or food literacy. Current interventions in nutrition literacy vary from one-another in terms of their scope, theories used, intervention methods and measurement tools used in conducting the study, hence, it is challenging to compare results in order to further the knowledge boundary of the field. The main objective of this review, thus, is to understand in qualitative detail how past interventions were structured in achieving their aim of improving the nutrition literacy of the participants through nutrition education. This review will contribute to the growing field of nutrition education and literacy by highlighting effective theoretical underpinnings and techniques that can be employed in future interventions aimed at raising the nutrition literacy of the participants. A structured way of approaching future nutrition interventions is suggested drawing from the integration of Social Cognitive Theory (SCT) developed by Bandura (1998) and the strategic areas of persuasive communication proposed by Gillespie (1999). Operationalization of the knowledge variable through defining the participant competencies in terms of functional, interactive and critical nutrition literacy is explored and applications of this exploration to future interventions is proposed.